Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Back in the days after the dot com crash and 9/11, I moderated a little support group of sorts on Yahoo for unemployed and under-employed executives. After getting to know many of the members, one common theme started to stand out. Most of them had never had to look for jobs before. Job offers had already come to them. When time came for them to prepare their resumes, many of them were simply finding the old resumes they used when they were fresh out of school, complete with bachelor's degrees listed at the very top, and inserting their most recent employment down below. Thus began a journey for me that has involved years of one-on-one resume critiques.

A lot has happened in the ensuing 8 years or so. Many people are a lot more sophisticated with respect to the way that they network and manage their careers. Yet, many of the resumes I see today aren't all that different from the ones I was reviewing back then.

The challenge for job seekers today is that the must differentiate themselves from the countless other applicants against whom they are competing. I heard on the news the other day that there are six job seekers in the US right now for every open position. My experience as a corporate recruiter is that there are hundred of people applying for just about every open position that gets posted online. Shake out the many desperate or indiscriminate individuals who apply for every opening they see, and you still are facing really slim odds.

Here are a few things I see commonly which, in my opinion, do little or nothing to help you in this respect:

Listing Competencies:

Many leadership resumes will begin with a laundry list of competencies which the candidate hopes to use to define himself or herself. Typically this list appears just under the objective or summary statement. In resume terms, this is prime real estate. This is the section of the resume that you're using to entice the reader to go further down the page - to get into the meat of your resume. Common phrases will include things like Visionary Leadership, Profit and Loss Responsibility, Mentoring, Vendor Management, and Change Management. Somewhere, I'm sure that someone has compiled a list of the catch phrases. I'd imagine that there are at least fifty or so that are commonly used.

The problem is that I doubt if anyone really reads these. Even if they do, do you think it really matters? Can you imagine a CEO reading over a resume and thinking, "I see that Susan listed mentoring on her resume and Bob didn't, so I'm going to put Susan's resume in the keeper stack." Of course not. Because all of the phrases start to sound the same, and if someone is reading the 20th resume in a stack of 50 resumes, and they all take that approach, none of the stand out.

Focusing On Responsibilities

Let me be clear that you have to explain in some detail what you did. However, talking about your responsibilities doesn't answer the "So what?" question.

Responsible for $2 million annual budget (So what? That proves you know how to spend money.)

Led application development team. (So what? What did you and your team accomplish of significance?)

Met daily with company CEO. (OK, you get the idea. It doesn't matter who you met with or what you did unless it resulted in some accomplishments that you can point to that brought value to the organization.)

Trying to tell EVERYTHING about yourself

People try to accomplish this by either filling up their resumes with huge paragraphs that essentially become walls of words that are too much for the reader to easily process. Alternately, they offer a page full of bullet points, implying that everything that's bulleted is of critical importance. The problem is that if you stress everything, you have effectively not stressed anything. The eye won't naturally fall on any of the bullet points as the reader tries to scan down the document.

Something Different...

An approach that I have been recommending for years, which I feel will help anyone stand out who has served in a leadership role is to focus on accomplishments.

What I'd recommend would look something like this:

John Q Public

In this paragraph, you want an objective or summary statement. It's three, no more than four lines about who you are, and what you bring to the table, or what kind of position you're seeking. I gravitate more toward a summary, rather than an objective, but am fine with either. The main purpose of this is just to make sure that your resume ends up in the hands of the right person, or is considered for the right openings.

Selected Accomplishments

Proposed, designed, and implemented new XYZ system, resulting in $500,000 in annual savings per year.

Brought about world peace.

Responsible for $25 million annual budget

(I actually would like to see more space between each bullet point, but this blog editor isn't cooperating. Two of these accomplishments are poorly written for a resume. World peace isn't quantified in terms of revenue generated, cost savings, or any other quantifiable measurement communicating value to the organization so, while commendable, shouldn't be listed. As mentioned above, being responsible for a large annual budget isn't really an accomplishment, though many people think it is. It simply means you know how to spend money. It doesn't answer the "So what?" question? ... What did you do for the organization with that 25 million?)

Experience

XYXCorp.com 2006 to Present

Director of Really Important Things

What I'd like to see here would be a short paragraph, or no more than four lines, that lists your responsibilities. Be sure to use action verbs. The Ladders, a website with a completely preposterous premise, has a good article on the subject here: Resume Action Verbs Article You never want your experience summaries to go more than 4 lines.

Under each position (and you can align them all the way left) include a couple of slightly more detailed accomplishments. They can go up to 2 1/2 lines apiece.

Remember that good accomplishments are quantifiable. Here in the meat of your resume, you can include some details regarding how you achieved the accomplishments. Up above, you just want to focus on the results.

GreatBigCorp, Inc 2004 to 2006

Manager of Pretty Important Things

Follow the same pattern as above. List your responsibilities. Note that it's not important that the person who's reviewing your resume actually read these details on the first pass. Instead, your hope is that he/she will scan down your resume, noting your position titles, and accomplishments.

If your accomplishments are compelling enough, then the person will want to go back and read your resume again in greater detail.

What you're doing is communicating a story, that wherever you go, you make a very positive impact. It's implicit that you can do the same for this potential employer.

Writing a resume is much more of an art than a science. If you speak with 99 other recruiters, you'll hear 99 other opinions regarding what makes a good resume. At least you will until this blog gets popular. ;-)

I think if you follow this approach though, you'll accomplish two important things:

Your resume will be easy to read and process. What's important will stand out.

Your "value proposition" will be clearly communicated.

I hope that you find this to be helpful and would love to hear from you if you do. I also welcome ideas regarding other creative approaches that have worked for you.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

This is pretty basic, but it actually comes up more often than one would think. When submitting your resume either by email, or as an attachment as a part of an online application, you need to keep in mind that not only will one or more people take a look at it, that resume is more than likely going to be stored online in a resume database of some sort. Sometimes, in addition to submititng your resume, you will be asked to complete a variety of fields which include basics like name, address, and phone number. However, some systems have the ability to grab that information off of your resume, provided you help them at least a little.

Keep it simple. Put your name in bold at the top of your resume. It can be centered, or justified to one side or the other. That doesn't really matter. The key is to make it easy for the software to find it.

A few common pitfalls which can confuse software include the following:

Text Boxes: Many resume databases don't have a mechanism for incorporating the contents of text boxes into the data that they grab. Therefore, if your name is front and center, at the top of a resume where it should be, but in a text box, it might get missed. Just this week, a woman sent me such a resume. It was beautiful... Very well written ... Nicely laid out. When my software grabbed it though, and I looked at the summary of her contact information, the software had decided that her name was: Profile.

In my case, I do my best to check every resume that gets entered into my system. Imagine though that your resume is going intot he database of one of those search firms that runs lots of phantom openings. (They look like openings, but they aren't real.) They have sucked in several hundred resumes int he past few days and some admin assistant has clicked on abutton and processed them all intot he database. You call a few days later:

(You) - Hello, this is Sandy Jones. I'm calling about my resume....
(Recruiter) - I don't see a Sandy Jones in our database...

It's a problem that the recruiter can easily fix. Let's say though that you didn't follow up, and the mistake wasn't spotted. Several months later, a hiring manager who you have networked with calls the recruiter.

(Manager) Could you pull up the resume of Sandy Jones? I'd like to have a look at it...
(Recruiter) I don't see anyone in our database with that name. Maybe she emailed her resume to the wrong address. That happens from time to time.
(Manager) Hmmm. OK. Well, here's the type of person I need. ... Please see if you can turn up some candidates for me.

And you have just missed out on an opportunity.

Headers: Placing your name in a header seems like a good way of saving space. However, some systems don't read headers when looking for contact information either. Additionally, resumes often get reviewed without being printed out. Sometimes people will have their word processor set so that the headers and footers don't even show up.

My pet peeve as a recruiter is that when I submit a candidate to a client, I include my company logo in the header. A resume that is formatted to look "right" with the name and contact information in the header generally requires some time and effort on my part to get it looking right again when I have to pull the name out and insert it into the text of the resume. ... All the more problematic if a candidate has created a resume using tables in the body of the resume. (Another pet peeve.)

Alphabet Soup: Ever see a name at the top of a resume like this?

Jon Jones, MBA, PhD, PMP, CCNA, UGI, CDC,PVC, NBA

Alphabet soup at the end of the name can screw up the identification of your name. More importantly, it actually can be viewed as a negative by many people. Some think that if you're really that good, you don't need to compensate by adding all the acronyms to your name. Some think it's a sign that you're pretentious or arrogant. Some will see the PhD in particular, and think you're an academic .... That you're not geared for the rough and tumble world of corporate America.

My personal feeling is that when you're really good, you don't need acronyms listed at the end of your name. You can and should list all of your certifications and qualifications on your resume. It's just a questions of how they are presented.

S P A C I N G:

Every blue moon, I see a name on a resume that looks like this:

B E A U R E G A R D Q. P E R I W I N K L E

Simply put, when you add a space between all of the letters of your name, it makes it impossible for most software applications to accurately parse out your name. Regardless of how good you think it looks, it's not a good idea.

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About Me

I have been involved in the recruiting process for most of my adult life. I get a great deal of satisfaction from matching talented people with employers' needs. More than simply filling jobs though, I value the relationships with people that I have been able to develop over the years.

I aspire to be more tomorrow than I am today and more today than I was yesterday, and to leave the world better for my having been here.

I'd be honored to have the opportunity to meet you and assist you in locating and recruiting the best people to help your company succeed.